


Atonement

by Morkhan



Category: Until Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-06
Updated: 2015-09-05
Packaged: 2018-04-19 06:53:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4736732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morkhan/pseuds/Morkhan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Let's hope it's not too late for atonement."</p>
<p>Josh makes it out of the mines and gets a chance to redeem himself.  The question is; how?  The question is; can he keep it together long enough to pull it off?  The question is; what will it cost him?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Atonement

**Author's Note:**

> Alright, kids, guess who’s Rami Malek trash? It's me! I am! :D I need Josh to have a happy ending. Not like rainbows and puppies or anything, but something. I need him to get some kind of redemption, so this is me giving it to him.
> 
> This assumes you made certain decisions with your game and that everyone has survived up until this point. It starts at the point it deviates from the game—when the Hannah-digo ambushes Josh and Mike. Enjoy!

It rises out of the water in front of him, limbs like branches and skin like wood.  A tree with teeth, eyes, and a horrible soul-searing _screech_.  Its voice peels the skin off of his face and he screeches back until blood pools in his throat.

“You’re NOT REAL!  NO, YOU’RE NOT!”

Claws hook through his shirt and lift him up and then he sees it, the tattoo, little black butterfly, _so fucking stupid, actors don’t have tattoos dumb-dumb_ , that’s what he’d said to her.  She’d just stuck her tongue out at him and said _Angelina Jolie has tattoos and she gets cast anyway, they’ll work around it, I’m worth it_ , and he’d just laughed, because it was the most Hannah thing she could’ve said, and.  And.

Her name tumbles out of him like blood, like a waterfall, like a foreign object he’d been choking on until someone punched him in the gut.  “Hannah!?”

And it (she) looks at him, _looks_ at him with its (her) milk-white eyes, searching, scanning, sucking the breath from his lungs like a Dementor, and then he’s being carried off, dragged away, dragged back to that dark room in his mind, his prison cell where all of his terror lies waiting to crawl under his skin like a botfly and lay eggs inside of him.  He screams, and screams, and screams.

And then there is another one and they’re fighting, he’s in the water and scrambling worse than when he was 3 at the beach and a fish brushed against his leg.  He’d screamed and run for the shore so fast he swore he was running on water for a second.  Then he’d fallen and cut his face on a seashell.

This time when he falls, Mike catches him, whirls him around, slams him into a rock wall with a hand clamped on his mouth like a bear trap.  “SHUT UP!” he says.  “Shut the fuck up and do. Not. Move.  They see when you move.”

He wants to scream, he wants to cry, because he doesn’t understand what’s happening, how any of this could be real, and Mike is pressing on his mouth so hard that it feels like he’s about to swallow his teeth.  But he doesn’t.  He just nods.  Because he knows, he knows what happens now if you don’t do what Mike says.  Mike can have a very commanding presence when he wants to.  The bruises on his face attest to that.

His eyes find the tree people, skittering like spiders over walls and ceiling, screaming, clawing.  They move wrong.  Too fast, too stiff, too sudden.  Stop motion.  Claymation.  Can’t be real.  Can’t be, yet Mike’s eyes flicker and follow them too, and Mike’s breaths come in short, sharp gasps.  He’s afraid.  He’s afraid too.  And he wouldn’t be, not unless there was something to be afraid of.

One slams the other through a wall, tackles it to the ground and starts tearing, ripping, screaming, claws flying and flesh rending beneath it, and Mike is pulling him along, pulling him through the cave and out, guiding him like a dog, like a blind man because he can’t take his eyes off the tree people.  The _monsters_.  The monster in his sister’s skin.

* * *

Eventually they are out of sight, out of the caves.  Out of the mines, into the snow, big white night.  Josh feels cold, the water soaked into his clothes weighing him down.  The chill grounds him.  The crunch of the snow beneath his feet.  The flakes on his eyelashes.  These are real, real, real, details his mind wouldn’t bother to fill in.  He’s out.  He’s out of his head, and thank _fuck_.  He hates it in there.

They walk in silence and Josh feels like he is _reforming_ , like the T-1000, a puddle of goo slowly shaping itself back into human.  When his mouth reforms, there is only one thing on it.

“H-Hannah?” he says, his voice cracking.  Fuck off, puberty.  “Was that Hannah?”

Mike’s eyes are careful.  He looks at Josh sideways, like a bomb triggered by eye contact.  He’s scared.  Of Josh.  For Josh. Who the fuck knows anymore?  “You’re fucking crazy,” Mike says.  “You really think that thing—”

Mike is a shitty liar.  “You know something,” Josh says, and Mike shuts right up.  Ha.  Knew it.  “That thing had my sister’s tattoo.  _What was it_?”

Mike stops walking with a sigh, and turns to look right at him.  “Look, man,” he says, hand to forehead, and where did all those bruises come from?  Was Mike this beat-up before?  “There are some things… this whole situation… you don’t want to know, man.  It’s not gonna help.  It’s fucked up.”

Josh stares him down.  Fuck that shit right in the earhole.  “Tell me.”

Mike throws his hands up.  “Josh… look, you’re teetering on the edge as it is—!”

“Teetering?” he laughs, incredulous.  “Look at me, man!”  He pulls on his shirt, his meticulously-crafted psycho outfit, and _laughs_.  “I’m already gone!  I’m so far over the edge I can’t even see the fucking cliff.  You want to know how far gone I am?”  He pauses, takes a breath, _okay, here comes the monologue.  Just like you rehearsed_.  Not who he rehearsed giving it to, but still.  Think of it as an audition.

“About month after,” he starts, “when it became obvious they weren’t coming home in anything but a bag, I started… preparing myself.”  He swallows.  “For what they’d look like.  When they were found.”  Smiles, joyless.  “Dad and mom are out of town so much, figured I might be called in to identify them.  Didn’t want to do anything embarrassing, like puke all over the morgue, or whatever, so I… when I couldn’t sleep, I’d look up pictures of corpses.”  He sniffs.  “Varying states of decomposition, different causes of death, all that stuff.  I’d just… look at corpses until 2am every night.  For weeks.  Imagining them as my baby sisters.”

Mike’s jaw drops, his breath fogging up the air.  “Jesus, man,” he says, hand through his hair.  “Why would you do that to yourself?”

He shrugs.  Tells the truth.  “Better than some of the other stuff I was thinking of doing.”

Mike crosses his arms.  The self-hug.  Classic sign of emotional distress.  Got him.  “Fuck, man.  _Fuck._ ”

“My threshold for fucked up is pretty fucking high,” Josh says.  “And I’ve been imagining the worst shit you can think of for a year now.  Nothing you can tell me is gonna change that, so please, Mike, _tell me what happened to my fucking sisters_.”

Mike sighs.  Breathes deep.  And tells him.  He starts talking, and Josh listens, stone-faced and calm.  The mountain.  A curse.  Wendigos.  Cannibalism.  _She was down there for weeks, a month.  And she… oh God, Beth_ …

And when the story is over, Josh very calmly nods, very calmly walks over to a snow-covered bush, and very calmly falls to his knees and pukes until there is nothing left inside of him at all.

When he’s done, Mike lifts him up, gets him standing, and walks him, arm-over-shoulder, back to the lodge.  Steering him, like a child, because he can’t be trusted to walk on his own.  He’s weak.  Small.  Empty.  His legs are jelly.  He’d just started to reform, and this reduced him to a quivering pile of offal.  He was wrong.  So wrong.  He’s never been so wrong in his life, and he’s been wrong a _lot_.  He thought he was becoming a person again, but now he’s just a walking corpse bleeding all over the beautiful snow.

God, this place is beautiful.  He feels like crying.  He is.

“I’m sorry, Josh,” Mike says, voice quiet, rough.  “I’m so fucking sorry, man.”

Me too, he doesn’t say.

* * *

They find Sam outside the cabin.  She looks at him for exactly one second and knows.  Knows he knows.

She hugs him.  “Oh God, Josh,” she says, squeezing tight.  “I’m so sorry.”

For a second, he doesn’t know what to do.  He’s too raw for this.  She’s not supposed to see him like this.  None of them are.  His armor is gone, his skin is gone, he is naked and bleeding, nerves and muscle tissue exposed to the elements.  She should be disgusted.  She should recoil.  Not embrace.

He can’t hug her back.  But he takes it in.  He lays his head on her shoulder and _feels_ it, more than he has felt any good thing in months.  If only he could tell her that.

“Let’s get inside,” Mike says.  “See if we can find the others.”

They walk to the basement, the safe room, _his lair_ , he’d called it, a lifetime ago when he’d thought he was so fucking smart.  He walks through the door and there is everyone.  Chris limping and wincing, Ashley propping him up, Emily charging directly at him. 

Oh, shit—!

Her hand hits his face like a comet, sending him straight to the floor.  She hits him again.  And again.  Everyone is hitting him tonight, but Emily’s slaps are especially painful.  The woman has hands of steel.  She must slap mannequins in her spare time or something.  _Jesus_.

Chris jerks her off of him.  “What the fuck, Emily?  He didn’t even do anything to you!”

Emily struggles to get at him again.  “Well, he would’ve!” she counters (which is fair).  “And it’s his fault we’re up here to begin with!”

Mike puts a hand on her shoulder (which she immediately jerks away from).  “If it’s his fault, it’s our fault,” he says.  “We started this avalanche of disaster.”

“But we didn’t mean for any of this to happen!” Emily says.

“Neither did he,” Mike answers.

“Well, WE weren’t _trying_ to hurt anyone!” Emily says.

“We were trying to hurt Hannah,” comes Ashley’s soft voice.

Emily balls her fists, her face crumpling.  “It was just… it was just…”

And Josh finally finds his voice.  “It was just a prank,” he says quietly.

Silence falls like a fog.  There is nothing anyone can say to that.  They are all guilty.  Guilty, guilty, guilty.

All of them, that is, except Sam.  She helps Josh back to his feet.  “I think we’ve all done enough to each other for one night.”

She ushers him to the side and he turns to see that everyone has moved away from each other, retreating to their corners of the basement.  _And you told them you were a healer_ , a voice mocks from inside of his head.  _You bring people together_.

No, no, no, no, no, not now.  Not now, he said he was leaving.

_Oh, I could never leave you, Joshua.  Not truly._

He twitches, breath quickening.  Dr. Hill’s voice is like a gnat buzzing by his ear, a physical sensation.  He wants to swat at it.  It won’t help.

The others have begun talking in hushed voices, so Josh retreats to the monitor room, where Dr. Hill stands beside the control console, waiting, wearing the same feral smile and the same decrepit flesh as before.

“What do you want?” Josh whispers.

_The same thing I have always wanted_ , says the bad doctor.  _To help you_.

“I don’t need your help,” Josh whispers, folding his arms around himself, suddenly cold.  “You hate me.”

Dr. Hill purses his lips in mock sadness. _I don’t hate you, Joshua_.  _I simply refuse to coddle you in the manner to which you are accustomed.  Sometimes the truth hurts.  I am here to make you feel that pain_.

Josh closes his eyes.  “I don’t need this now.  Please go away.”

_Oh, but I can’t,_ Dr. Hill says.  _Not while there is yet more unpleasant truth you need to be made aware of._   He nods to the monitors.  _Look._

So he looks, and there he sees them.  His nightmares, crawling around on camera.  Stick monsters.  Tree people.  _Wendigos_ , Dr. Hill corrects.  Inside the house, prowling, searching.  _Hunting_.

“They’re here,” Josh whispers.

“What?” Sam says.  “Josh, who are you talking to?”

He can’t answer.  He points, silent, at the monitors.  Three of them.  One rustling around on the second floor.  One tearing apart the kitchen.  One in the den. 

“Oh, no…” Sam says.  “Guys, they’re in the house!”

The rest of the gang comes running over, sees what there is to see, and freaks.

“Oh shit,” Mike says.

“Oh fuck,” Chris says.

“Oh, no, no, no, no, no,” Emily says.

“Oh my God!” Ashley cries, and suddenly everyone is talking so fast he can’t keep up.

“What should we do?”

“We can’t stay here now!”

“Well, we can’t _leave_ either!”

“If we don’t leave, they’ll find us!

“If we try to leave, we might as well be walking into their fucking mouths!”

“We could try to fight them.  I can still shoot…”

“ _One_ of those things is enough to kill all of us, how are we gonna fight _three_ of them?”

“Oh God, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh _god…_ ”

Josh covers his ears, trying desperately to drown out the noise, but Dr. Hill’s voice pierces him like a nail.  _Look at them, Joshua.  Look at what you have done to them.  Look at what your ‘game’ has wrought._

The arguments get louder, the cries of despair more insistent.  Hands gesticulating, voices raising, faces reddening.  They’re crumbling.  They’re crumbling right in front of him and he can’t do anything to stop it.

_Your delusions of grandeur have doomed you, and your friends alongside you,_ Dr. Hill says, circling his friends like a predator.  _Now you will watch as your friends tear each other apart, before they are torn apart themselves._ He stares at Josh with eyes that make him feel two inches tall.  With a smile that makes him feel like food. _You wanted to play God.  You wanted to be the monster in your own little horror show, but the_ real _monsters were there all along.  You were nothing more than… a distraction._

He blinks.  Distraction.  The word sticks in his mind, echoes in a dark cavern.  A _distraction_.  A side-show, a parlor trick, an illusion.  Smoke and mirrors.  Industrial lightbulbs and voice modulators.  Of course.  Of fucking course.  The whole fucking thing is just a distraction.  That’s why he built it; to distract him from the maelstrom inside his head, the toxic fucking sludge pit of guilt and self-loathing he’d been swimming in.  Give his mind something to focus on, his hands something to reach for besides a razor blade or a bottle of pills.  Josh Washington knows distractions, he knows them better than he knows anything.  He’s not just a distraction; he’s _the_ distraction.

It comes to him so quickly, so naturally.  He can’t believe he didn’t think of it sooner.

Dr. Hill stops his circling, looks at Josh flatly.  _You know what you must do,_ he says.

Josh returns his gaze, and nods.

And Dr. Hill smiles.  Actually _smiles_ , the customary ferality bleeding away.  _Deep breaths, Josh_.

So Josh breathes deep.  “Guys.”  The arguing continues, louder, sharper.  “GUYS!”  Still nothing.  “HEY, ASSHOLES!”

Five mouths shut up.  Five sets of eyes turn fearfully towards him.

“I can get you out of here,” Josh says.

Sam squints at him.  “Wait, what?”

Josh nods to the computer in front of the monitors.  “I got this whole place rigged.  I can control everything from here; doors, windows, electronics… other assorted amenities.”

“Okay…” Mike says.  “How does that help us?”

Josh grins.  “These suckers track movement, right?  Well, I can move all sorts of shit.  I got tricks for days.  The puppet master still has plenty of strings to pull.”

“Josh, what are you saying?” Sam asks.

_Focus_ , Josh.  He gives her a sober look.  “I distract the Wendigos with the house while you guys sneak out,” he says.  “Once you’re out, I lock them inside.  You guys make a break for the cable car, wham, bam, thank you ma’am, you’re home free.”

Sam squints at him.  “What about you?”

He shrugs.  Grins.  “What _about_ me?  Somebody’s gotta drive this thing,” he says, heading over to a side table and starting to dig through a pile of junk.

“Dude,” Chris says.  “If those things catch you, they’ll rip you apart!”

“Well, then I hope they don’t catch me,” he says, pulling out a headset and tossing it to Sam.  “Here.  I’ll talk you through it.  I’ve only got one more, so the rest of you guys will just have to follow her lead.  Move when she moves, freeze when she freezes, got it?”

He heads over to the computer and starts typing.  A chorus of slams and clicks echoes through the basement, causing Ashley to jump.  “What was that?”

“I just put the house on lockdown, so nobody can open doors right now but me,” Josh says.  “You guys better get going.”

No one moves.  Even Emily seems uncertain.

“Josh,” Mike says carefully.  “I don’t think you understand the situation here.  If you do this, they _will_ find you.  You’ll die, and we are talking messy, _bad_ death.”

Josh shrugs.  Smiles, looking down.  “Would that really bother anybody at this point?”

“ _YES!_ ” comes the answer from Chris and Sam, so emphatic that he actually jumps a little.

 “Josh, what you did here was fucked up and sad, but you don’t deserve to _die_ for it,” Sam says.

“Yeah, dude,” Chris adds.  “I want you to get better.  You kinda gotta be alive for that.”

“I’m with them,” Mike nods.  “I mean, I think you belong in a penitentiary, or, or a psyche ward, but not in the _ground_ , man.  Not like this.”

“There has to be another way,” Ashley says softly.

Josh shakes his head.  They care.  They still care.  He doesn’t understand.  _Why?_   “It doesn’t matter,” he says, looking up at Sam with soft eyes.  “Hannah’s here.  I won’t leave her again.”

Sam clenches her jaw, closes her eyes and sighs.

“Wait, what!?” Chris barks.

“What did you just say?” Ashley asks.

Emily puts a hand over her mouth.  She looks sick.  “Oh, God.  It makes sense.  Oh, _God_ , Hannah…”

“What are you guys talking about?” Chris asks.

Mike shakes his head.  “We don’t have time to explain.”  He steps forward and puts a hand on Josh’s shoulder, looking him square in the eye.  “You sure about this, man?”

Josh grins again, the classic technique.  He hides worlds behind this smile.  “Hey, I’m just being a good host.  The party’s over, now I gotta make sure all my guests get home safe.”

Mike gives him a long, hard look, squeezes his shoulder, and nods.

Muffled shrieks, and the sounds of slamming.  Splintering wood.  They’re tearing at the doors.

“You guys have to go, now!” Josh says.  Runs to the control console, taps some keys.  A door opens leading out.

“Josh, bro…” Chris says.

“GO!” Josh barks.

“Come on,” Mike says, ushering everyone out.  One by one, they bid him silent goodbye.  Ashley gives him sad eyes and a lost look.  Emily gives him an uncertain glance tossed over her shoulder—more than he expected, to be honest.  Chris stops in the door and gives him a long look.  He forms a fist and places it over his heart, lips pursed and eyes brimming.  Josh mirrors the gesture with the same expression.

And just like that, Chris is gone.  Which just leaves Sam.

“Josh…” Sam says quietly.

“Go,” Josh says.  “You’re the leader, the Final Girl.  We all know how this story goes.”

Her eyes are so soft when she looks at him, he feels like he could sleep in them.  “So what does that make you?”

Josh gives her a tearful grin.  “Sacrificial Lamb.”

She hugs him again, the second time tonight.  This time, he hugs her back, digs his fingers deep into her shirt, hooks his chin over her shoulder, closes his eyes and thinks, _I could die like this._   And then she’s gone, running out like she’s afraid she’ll change her mind.  Josh mirrors her fear, running to the console to shut the door behind her.  The slam echoes through the newly silent basement.  _Alone_.  He’s alone.  The word sticks sideways in his chest, like a broken bone, and he suddenly feels like he’s been stabbed.  _Alonealonealonealonealone_ , he’s going to die alone.  His chest locks up as he fights back a sob.

_Breathe, Joshua_ , comes Dr. Hill’s voice, and he swears he can almost feel phantom hands on his shoulders, steadying him.  _Your friends need you.  Now is not the time to fall apart._

Josh nods.  “Okay,” he mumbles.  “Okay, okay, okay, it’s gonna be okay.”

He’ll die alone, but he’ll die a… something.  Not a hero, no.  A friend.  Yeah.  He’ll die a friend.

There are worse things to die as.

**Author's Note:**

> COMING UP NEXT: It’s Josh versus Wendigos in the Washington horror house, and brother and sister have a final (fatal) family reunion.
> 
> Any and all comments are welcome! Thanks for reading!


End file.
